#952 4/21/19 – Why the Past Two Nights are Different From All Other Nights

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Perhaps nothing we do so connects us individual grassroots diaspora Jews to Jewish peoplehood as annually recounting to ourselves and our children and grandchildren the story of the Exodus and Promised Land journey.  Not for almost two thousand years has a generation retelling that stirring story retold it, as we do, at a time of Jewish independence in the homeland of Israel. 

That a week before Passover religious leaders of the two largest religious streams of American Jews should publicly call on the American President to restrain the Israeli premier from taking  political steps bearing on political sovereignty in parts of the land of Israel exceeds the scope of religious subjects upon which such religious leaders can speak ex cathedra.  Grassroots Reform and Conservative American Jews should make clear that this was not done in their name.  

This Week:  Why the Past Two Nights Are Different From All Other Nights

More Jews – Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, secular, even otherwise uninvolved – observe Passover than any other Jewish commemoration.  Why is that?  Because it’s the one active thing that we do each year – tell our children that it’s because of that which the Lord did for us when we came forth out of Egypt – that links us and them to our Jewish peoplehood roots.  We don’t just passively take them to a synagogue or meeting hall to hear a rabbi or historian tell them.  We tell them, in the doing of which, of course, we retell ourselves.

It all sounds very unifying, Jews all over the world most of whom can’t speak each others’ languages still commemorating annually on the same nights according to a calendar adhered to by no one else in the world a peoplehood forming event thousands of years old.  But “unified,” certainly today – at least as between Israeli and American Jews, today’s Jewish people’s two primary groups – is not what we are.   There is no sugar-coating either the emotional intensity or Jewish history ramification of the fundamental difference on the State of Israel’s final borders between Israeli and U.S. diaspora Jews.

Each group is pretty much unified within itself.  Israelis just convincingly voted against parties openly advocating “the two-state solution,” even in the Arab-rejected sense of “two states for two peoples.”  Major American Jewish organizations, including the leadership structures of the Reform and Conservative movements, just openly wrote a joint open letter to the U.S. President, “imploring” him, as the JTA put it, to “restrain” the Israeli premier from “annexing the West Bank” (Bibi had mentioned extending Israeli sovereignty to “settlements” over the 1949 ceasefire line) – JTA, 4/13/19: “Reform, Conservative Jews to Trump: Don’t Let Netanyahu Annex West Bank.”  The ZOA among other American Jewish organizations responded with their own statement, but the Reform movement’s Central Conference of American Rabbis and Union for Reform Judaism, along with the Conservative movement’s United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, Rabbinical Assembly and Zionist affiliate Mercaz, along with the ADL, National Council of Jewish Women, etc., are heavyweights in speaking in the name of American Jews.

Lifelong familiar passages in the Passover Haggadah praise the Almighty for leading us into the land of Israel, building for us the Temple, and more, but in making our homeland case to the world we must publicly state, if not entirely internally base, that case on non-theological events and legal principles entirely of this world.  So the this-world appeal I make this Passover week to all of us diaspora Jews is two-fold:

First, three millennia of uninterrupted homeland Jewish history – it really happened, if you doubt this go to Amazon and get my book on it – and modern international recognition, San Remo and the Palestine Mandate, establish the reality of the Jewish homeland claim to the land of Israel – Israel & Judah, Yehud, Judaea, Palestine, a name invented by Romans to disassociate what had been Judaea from Jews, each name saturated with the blood of homeland Jews defending it against Assyrians, Babylonians, Seleucids, Romans or Crusaders.

Second, if the Jewish people has a valid homeland claim to the land of Israel, it is incumbent upon members of the Jewish people not resident in that homeland to defer to those living in it and defending it against those who seek to destroy it and its Jews in the making of literally life-and-death decisions on war and peace in that homeland.  It’s not for us diaspora Jews to tell Israeli Jews whether or not to walk out of historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria, and slink back to those 9-miles-wide-in-the-lowland middle 1949 military ceasefire lines the media and world mockingly call “Israel’s 1967 borders,” creating in the historic capital and land of Israel’s hill country heartland a “demilitarized Palestinian state” west of the Jordan.

The JTA article on those heavyweight American Jewish groups’ open letter to President Trump quoted the ADL head “We continue to believe in the two-state solution.”  The Reform and Conservative Judaism movements are religious, not political, organizations.  Their leaders can certainly speak their personal views on political issues, but can’t speak ex cathedra in the name of their members and movements on whether the State of Israel should retreat to 1949 military ceasefire lines, send or not send a second spaceship to the moon, or whatever.   Yet, that is exactly what these American Jewish religious leaders have done, and their members, individual grassroots American Jews, should publicly disclaim that it was done in their name.